Phone likely led authorities to Saint-Denis, where clash left suspected "guru" dead.

Further Reading

French police found an unencrypted, unlocked phone in a trash bin outside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris that contained a text sent in the clear: “On est parti on commence.” (“Let’s go, we’re starting”).

This lead may have led French authorities to an apartment in Saint-Denis, where a Tuesday night shootout left two suspects dead, including the believed mastermind, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. The assault comes just days after last Friday's Paris terrorist attack perpetrated by members of the Islamic State (also known as Daesh, ISIS, or ISIL) resulted in the murder of 129 people.

According to the French newspaper Libération, the police also located a map of the Bataclan on the same phone. However, authorities were unable to identify the recipient of the phone message.

Despite that setback, French investigators were seemingly able to get a tower history of the phone and then locate a hotel in Alfortville, just outside the French capital. At that hotel, the bank card of Salah Abdeslam, one of the suspected terrorists still at large, reserved two rooms the night before the attack.

Woolsey elaborated that the changes made by the Obama administration to surveillance as a result of the Snowden leaks and the changes that terrorists made in communicating with each other based on the leaks had led directly to the inability of the intelligence community in the United States and in France to stop the Paris attacks from happening.

Hours after the Saint-Denis raid, the Manhattan district attorney called for new federal legislation that would require that smartphone makers like Apple and Google put backdoors into their software.

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is due out in May 2018 from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar